I'm reading about holocaust denial after a fellow at Rough Edges gave me one of their pamphlets. Holocaust deniers, who are mostly just neo-Nazis, basically seem to be saying that "we didn't kill six million Jews but we would if we could." They feign horror at the suggestion that Hitler would ever harm a hair on a Jewish head, but then talk about how awful Jewish people are and if they were slightly harmed they totally had it coming.

But it's interesting to read about all the myths (accepted as myths by both sides) that I remember as being historical facts when I went to Germany as a kid. I thought most of the killings happened in Germany for instance. But it seems that nearly all of them happened in Poland, because German people got upset at Hitler when he tried to mass kill people in Germany. And Nazis didn't make soap out of concentration camp victims either.

I know it's difficult to care about fact-checking when you're dealing with folk like the Nazis, but I suspect if the Allies had been a bit more careful about the rumours that were spread, there probably wouldn't be such a successful Holocaust denial industry today.

Thankfully, Libby, Alex, Sophie, Graham, Sam, Sarah and I all were herded up by Miles to go see Gotye last night. I probably would have forgotten if it had been up to me, like I did with The Shins.

Gotye was beautiful. Although most of his live goodness was due to his lanky charisma, rather than the vibe of the music. So much of the music was presampled that it didn't fully feel like a live concert. But his songs are so good and his lankiness is so lanky that you couldn't help but love it all.

We watched Miss Potter last night. Despite having Emily Watson in it, I thought it was pretty bad.

Jem planted some rhubarb last year, but it appeared to die not that long after. Now it is coming back. Beautiful.

Since moving this blog to SliceHost the page load time has dropped from over a second to 100-200ms. Sweet. I don't even have the cache turned on anymore.

One of the best things about this semester is that instead of spending $250 or more on textbooks I only have to spend $15.50 on one development reader. My two other subjects are both using textbooks I already own. Combined with no more union fees I'm going to be so rich. I usually spend the first half of term catching up on all the beginning of term extravagance.

In all, 109 subjects were recruited by means of a background questionnaire. They were then divided into three groups according to age, gender and soup preference.

I find my job really difficult and mostly it just makes me unhappy. However, sometimes I really love coming into uni in the morning, getting a coffee (and occasionally a vegan muffin) and going to the office. I have a little heater for winter, a little air conditioner for summer and a fast computer. Compared to working in a coal mine or something it's not such a tough job at all.

For folk who like all talking and no action, Amazing Grace is a tops film. I went to see it with my grandmother today and we both liked it. It was all about slaves and old-school English politics and William Wilberforce and his spunk of an articulate, class-conscious wife. William Wilberforce was being nice to animals (even edible ones) way back before people even started being nice to black people. William Pitt is also way cool, but I thought that before I saw this film.

We went to see it at George St tonight. It was great. Just like a Simpsons episode, but longer.

I used to think Raja must be the weirdest dog in the world. And then I looked after Maggie. Raja is still pretty weird, but this week he is projecting normality like you wouldn't believe. At first I thought I must be doing something wrong because Maggie just barked all the time. But she has food and water a somewhere to sleep and I don't know what else dogs need. Maybe what she really wants is somewhere inside to wee. Weeing on the kitchen floor is her favourite hobby after barking.

I tried to glue the French's door, but mostly just succeeded in gluing my hand. It is very, very gluey and I am slightly worried that some of the glue went into Hannah's gluten-free spaghetti.

Havoc was awesome and for more reasons than just Anne Hathaway. I thought it might be a bit corny, with a name like Havoc. But it wasn't at all. It was all good. It was about rich white American kids who want to be black gangsters because their lives are so surreal. For kind of a silly thing to do, the movie did well not to make fun of the characters. For a female director though, there were a lot of breasts. They probably had some symbolic significance that went past me.

Feast is billed as a fun, dumb B-grade horror film. It's mostly dumb with a little bit of fun. My favourite part was where the heroine knocks out the fangs of the big monster one by one with a piece of wood and then kills it by thrusting her arm down its throat and suffocating it. It was rated R, but it was all so over the top that it wasn't really confronting at all. I don't know if I'd want my kids to watch it though.

Children of Men was beautiful, but probably not as good as I was expecting. I can't put my finger on what was missing. As a piece of art though, it was brilliant. Wonderful long shots. Amazing sets. Perhaps the problem was the lack of purpose. It was that you didn't feel the characters had a sense of urgency, but I couldn't relate to the urgency. Their destination was mostly symbolic. The relationships were pragmatic. The girl was only important because of what she had. That was the nature of the world they were living in to a large extent, but I didn't feel like it made for a satisfying story.

I found a bug in the Windows Save As dialog. It's only a little one - it's really a display bug - but it's surprising after 10 years or so of the same dialog.

1. File > Save As
2. Click on an existing file (it becomes the name of the file you're going to save)
3. Rename it to something else (the file is renamed but the File name field is unchanged)
4. Click Save

Windows asks you if you want to replace the existing file, even though the name you have is different to the existing one.

Doing one less subject is good for my marks. I went from a pass average last semester to an HD average this semester. And this was a pretty crap semester as well.

I had expected this film to be totally violent and unpleasant. Not the sort of film that a lot of people would be keen to watch. But it wasn't that violent and it is definitely a film that everyone should watch. It does a really good job of trying to explain kidnappings (and other class crime) in Latin America, without letting the kidnappers off too lightly. All the kidnappers were arseholes but a lot of what they said was reasonable.

On top of that is was really well made, it was interesting and the actors were tops. It was also fun to see a bit of what Caracas is like. Hugo Chavez certainly hasn't succeeded in turning it into a socialist utopia. Despite all his talk, I reckon he's a total moderate. He's more like Daniel Ortega than Fidel Castro. Which isn't a bad thing. I love Daniel Ortega and Fidel Castro, but for quite different reasons.

Sometimes, being a male, gives me a little bit of an idea of what it must feel like to be of middle-eastern appearance. I thought it was meant to take Hannah from school to Burdett St this afternoon. I showed up there 15 minutes early, because I'd had to take the car to the NRMA assessor beforehand. It seemed very quiet and while I waited I started moving all the junk out of the back seat into the boot so there would be room for Hannah. Mum rung me about the car and while I was chatting to her a man came up and stood beside me. I felt a bit nervous so I stopped talking to mum and started talking to him. He interrogated me for a minute or so and told me that it was a student-free day and that it was weird that I had showed up there. He asked me if I was related to Hannah, which I get asked a lot. In that context saying you're a "friend" sounds so molestery, but that's what I always say. Since most abuse is done by members of the family, it is kind of a funny question. But I suppose it's much harder for people to stop abuse from a family member. They can't tell creepy members of the family to bugger off, but they can say that to creepy people who claim to be "friends".

I can understand why they are paranoid about men around schools. And assuming a man is a child molester is probably a more logical predjudice that assuming a Muslim is a terrorist. I'd reckon the proportion of Muslims who are terrorists would be less 0.01%. The proportion of males who molest children must be a whole bunch higher than that.

I am now the proud owner of two Wikileaks domains and Wikileaks Australia, a non-profit organisation dedicated to truth and democracy and all that jazz. If I am ever spontaneously assassinated by the CIA you'll know why.

I like Ryan Reynolds when he has a gun and that is why I hired this film. It also had Alicia Keys in it, and Bob Dylan likes her so I figured I probably would as well. I did too. It was a cracker of a blood orgy. It didn't really stop. I reckon it's the sort of film that lots of action directors hope to make at some point in their life. The idea was to get as many professional killers from different backgrounds into the same building at once, and have them all try and hit one guy. A very simple idea and as you'd expect it offers plenty of opportunity for extravagant killing of protagonists, antagonists and bystanders alike.

I enjoyed it a lot. The violence was rather beautiful. You could tell they spent a long time working out every scene. You have to appreciate directors to take pride in their violence.

Tears of the Sun was an "ethical" action movie about how sometimes killing a lot of people is the only principled choice you can make. Fortunately, the world only has good people and bad people so it's mostly pretty easy to work out which ones need killing and which ones need saving. It was also about being an American, and looks at the constructive steps America might take in reducing violence in Africa.

I have to say, I'm a little surprised at Monica Belucci who I nearly always love. Not only was her character incredibly annoying, but if it's possible for a French actor to betray their French roots then she definitely did. Apart from the similarity to the hundreds of years of French occupation of Africa, this film was as American and as not French as they come.

But it was entertaining violence. There were a lot of explosions and a lot of shooting, and I like that stuff. Quite a few stabbings as well. The baddies really were very bad, and certainly deserved any gratuitous knife guttings they may have received.

The Frames are playing at The Metro on the 14th August. They are $53. If anyone would like to go with me let me know. Tickets go on sale on the 20th July.

Paired comparisons for the evaluation of crispness of cereal flakes by untrained assessors: correlation with descriptive analysis and acoustic measurements

I could read research paper titles all day long. Oh yes, so I am.

And just now, in The Journal of Wildlife Management, I found "Do black bears respond to military weapons training?" Totally brilliant.

Sometimes my jobs leads me into funny areas.

Variation in social rank acquisition influences lifetime reproductive success in black-capped chickadees

This is one of the articles that is sort of related to our topic, but sadly won't be included because it isn't about a health issue. Not for humans at least. Problems with chickadee impotency is clearly health-related if you're a chickadee.

I got the new (by my impoverished standards) Frames CD yesterday. I'm only getting to my first listen now. I love em.

Mum's Citroen has a little display that tells you your fuel economy over the past few kilometers. It is giving me so much joy trying to get the numbers way down. I got most of the way home from the city at 5.4L/100km. Which dropped to 5.2L on the Newcastle freeway near Asquith.

It also made me realise how much higher Hornsby is than the city. You can pretty much roll most of the way from mum's house to Enmore if you set your mind to it.

I went to Exit the King tonight by myself. I wasn't sure if I was meant to find somebody to take mum's ticket, or even if I was meant to be going tonight. As it turned out, I was meant to be going and I should have got someone else to go with me to take the spare ticket.

Sadly, it was so extraordinarily bad that I left in the intermission. I've never done that before, because normally when it's that bad the theatre is half empty and I feel sorry for the actors. Geoffrey Rush was in this one, so the place was packed. I didn't feel so bad leaving.

Other people in the audience seemed to be laughing, but I reckon it was the worst Belvoir play I've seen, possibly equalled by the Threepenny Opera which we were ever so close to walking out of.

Instead of watching the end I went to Sagar South Indian restaurant to test out their masala dosas. Very good they were. Definitely a candidate for dosa club were it ever to recommence. I was the only person in the restaurant and I had a long chat with the waiter while I was eating. He had arrived from India recently and was a funny fellow indeed. He told me about this story he'd read and loved called The Silver Candlesticks. It was about this convict who stays the night as this bishops house and then steals his silver candlesticks. But when the police catch the convict the bishops tells them the candlesticks were a gift. I told the waiter that it sounded quite like another story I've heard about, but he insisted it was a different one.